HMS Stoic (P231): The Only Ship to Bear Her Name

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Stoic was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, ordered on 3 August 1941, laid down on 18 June 1942, launched on 9 April 1943 and commissioned on 29 June 1943 after speed trials on the Arran measured mile, under the command of Lieutenant Peter Barnsley Marriott and, from June 1945, Lieutenant James Newenham Elliott.

Marriott had her for almost the whole of it. He took command on 5 May 1943, before she commissioned, and handed over on 4 June 1945, which means every one of her seven war patrols was made under the same captain. That is unusual. Submarine commands turned over fast, because the work used men up and because a service that was expanding needed every qualified officer to have a boat, and a ship's company that keeps the same man for two years and seven patrols is a settled and experienced one. He held a DSO and a DSC. HMS Stonehenge sets out what the S class was and why so many of them ended up in the Far East.

Seven Patrols Across Two Theatres

Stoic's seven war patrols carried her from a first foray into northern Norwegian waters in September and October 1943 to a demanding run of Far East operations through 1944, including three patrols in the Malacca Strait between March and June, a patrol off Penang in July and August, a Java Sea patrol in October and November, and a final patrol in the Sunda Strait spanning December 1944 into January 1945.

The Patrol That Sank Nothing

One of those patrols does not appear in any list of what she destroyed, because she was not there to destroy anything. In April and May 1944 Stoic carried COPP 8 to north-west Sumatra.

The Combined Operations Pilotage Parties were among the least publicised and most alarming jobs of the war. Before any amphibious landing somebody has to know what the beach is actually like: how steeply it shelves, whether the sand will take the weight of a tank or swallow it, where the runnels and sandbars are, what obstacles have been planted, where the exits go. None of that can be established from a photograph or a chart. It has to be measured by a man lying in the surf in the dark with a lead line and a notebook made of waterproof paper, on a beach belonging to somebody else.

So a submarine took them. She would close the coast at night, surface, launch a canoe or put swimmers into the water, and then withdraw to seaward and dive for the day. The following night she would come back to a pre-arranged position and try to find two men in a small boat in the dark, using a shaded light or an infra-red beacon, on a coast where a searchlight or an alert sentry ends everybody's evening. COPP teams were lost doing this. So were the submarines that went in for them.

What they were surveying in 1944 was the ground for the return to Malaya and the East Indies, the landings that were being planned for 1945 and that the atomic bombs made unnecessary. So the beaches Stoic's passengers crawled up were measured for an invasion that never happened, which does nothing to reduce what it cost to measure them. HMS Porpoise was doing the same kind of work in the same waters that year and did not come back from it, and HMS Stygian towed a midget submarine into the Far East on a related errand.

Sinking the Kainan Maru

Among her successes, Stoic sank the Japanese transport ship Kainan Maru, the auxiliary gunboat Shoei Maru, the fishing vessel Nanyo Maru No.55, a landing craft, a coaster and six small sailing vessels, while also carrying out shore bombardments against warehouses and fuel tanks at Jangka Island, a remarkably varied record of anti-shipping and coastal harassment work.

The geography is the first thing to notice. Malacca Strait, Penang, the Java Sea, the Sunda Strait: those are the choke points of the whole East Indies, the narrow places every ship moving between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea has to pass. The Sunda Strait is about fifteen miles wide at its narrowest, between Java and Sumatra, and the Malacca Strait narrows to under thirty. A submarine posted in water like that does not hunt. She waits in a doorway. It also means she is never far from land, never in deep water, and always inside somebody's air patrol area.

That list is worth reading as evidence rather than as a score. A transport, an auxiliary gunboat, a fishing boat, a landing craft, a coaster, six small sailing vessels and a shore bombardment of warehouses and fuel tanks is not the record of a submarine hunting merchant fleets. It is the record of a submarine picking apart a coastal economy one small wooden thing at a time, because by 1944 that was all there was left in those waters to attack. HMS Thule sets out at length what that work involved and why British submariners found the gun actions against small craft so difficult.

The one that has a proper date is the Shoei Maru, an auxiliary gunboat of just under two thousand tons, torpedoed west of the Sunda Strait on 16 December 1944. An auxiliary gunboat is a converted merchantman with guns bolted on, used for escort and patrol work, and sinking one is worth rather more than the tonnage suggests: every escort destroyed is a convoy that has to sail with less protection or not at all.

The shore bombardment at Jangka is the other end of the same idea. A submarine carries one gun and a limited number of rounds and cannot hurt a defended position, but a warehouse or a fuel tank is a soft, stationary, flammable target, and destroying it costs the enemy materiel he cannot easily replace at the end of a very long supply line. It also tells the garrison that the sea in front of them is not theirs.

A Name Never Repeated

HMS Stoic survived the war and was sold for scrap in July 1950, broken up at Dalmuir. She remains, to this day, the only ship in the history of the Royal Navy to have carried the name Stoic, a small but distinctive footnote to a solid wartime record.

Seven years old when she was broken up at Dalmuir, and it is worth saying why. The Royal Navy came out of 1945 with far more submarines than it could man and disposed of most of them within five years, keeping the newest hulls and those best suited to what came next. The wartime S boats were small, built quickly, and designed for enclosed seas at a moment when the coming problem was tracking Soviet submarines in the deep Atlantic. Stoic was neither old nor worn out. She was simply surplus.

The name suits her better than most. A Stoic is somebody who does the difficult thing without making a performance of it, and her record is a fishing boat here, a coaster there, a fuel tank shelled at Jangka, and one patrol spent putting men onto a beach in Sumatra to measure the sand. Nothing on that list is famous. All of it was necessary, and HMS Shalimar, who worked the same water, is a reminder of how easily boats doing this sort of thing disappear from the record altogether.